Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (19 page)

Conflict between the Han Chinese settlers and old communities in Yunnan, both Muslim and non-Muslim, had been brewing for years and government officials invariably sided with the Han Chinese. In 1839, seventeen Muslims were massacred by a government-organized militia and in 1845 Chinese secret societies carried out a three-day rampage that left scores of Muslims dead or wounded. The tipping point came in 1856 when the Chinese heartland was itself in the grip of a gargantuan civil war, with Manchu forces battling Taiping rebels across the country. In May of that year, local officials joined by Chinese townspeople undertook a systematic pogrom in Kunming, killing up to 7,000 Muslims, including women and children, destroying mosques and calling for the extermination of Muslims throughout Yunnan. It was the beginning of a genocidal operation that would forever change the make-up of the southwestern frontier.

The Muslims fought back. There were reprisals against the Han Chinese, and by September Muslim-led militias had captured Dali. Under their leader Du Wenxiu, they declared a new and independent kingdom and Du Wenxiu became ‘Sultan Suleiman’. As imperial forces lost their grip on major towns and then struggled to maintain supply and communication lines with central China, there seemed at least a chance that a restored Yunnan state would survive. The rebellion was known as the ‘Panthay Rebellion’ after the Burmese word
Panthay
for the Muslims of Yunnan.

Du Wenxiu was then in his mid-thirties. He had been born to an elite Muslim family in the town of Baoshan close to the Burmese border. He had received a classical Chinese education and even studied for the imperial civil service. He now styled himself Generalissimo and Sultan of All the Faithful, establishing madrassa schools in areas under his control, encouraging Arabic teaching, and printing the first Koran in Chinese. He sent envoys to the Burmese king, Mindon, who sympathized with the Yunnanese rebels (whom he saw as the true ‘natives’ of Yunnan), but who in fear of China imposed trade sanctions against the Dali regime. He also sent representatives to Calcutta and his son ‘Prince Hassan’ to London, hoping in vain for British recognition and guns.

By the late 1860s, however, the prospects for lasting independence had dimmed. The Taiping had been crushed, and Manchu forces were able to concentrate on the recapture of Yunnan. One by one Muslim-held towns were overrun, and the people in them slaughtered, until by Christmas 1872 Manchu troops, supported by French gunners, were at the outskirts of Dali itself, surrounding the ancient city. Du Wenxiu decided to surrender himself in the hope that this would prevent a wholesale massacre. On 15 January 1878, dressed in his best robes, he was carried in his palanquin to the Chinese commander. Along the way he swallowed a fatal dose of opium. His wife and children poisoned themselves. Some accounts say he was dead by the time he reached the Chinese lines. Others say he was still alive and pleaded for the lives of his followers. He was decapitated, and his head was encased in honey and sent to the emperor.

No one knows how many were then killed. There was no mercy. The Chinese government says 10,000 were executed. Others say that 30,000 were killed out of Dali’s total population of 50,000. Hundreds drowned trying to swim across Erhai Lake. Others fled into the hills to be chased down by Manchu cavalry. For decades afterwards, European travellers to Yunnan noticed the desolation of the countryside, the many ruined towns and depopulated cities. Thousands of Panthay Muslims found their way to Burma where they still form a sizeable community, especially in the Shan hills, in Maymyo and Mandalay. In Yunnan itself, the demographic tide had swung decisively in favour of the Han Chinese.

Du Wenxiu’s house has been made into a museum. And when I went there on a sunny afternoon, kids dripping ice lollies on the floor, it looked like any prosperous Chinese house of the nineteenth century, with a courtyard and tiled roofs, and rusty weapons on display. In some of the rooms were maps and photographs, with captions describing the revolt. It was presented not as a Muslim rebellion but as a ‘revolutionary peasant uprising’. Du himself was called a ‘peasant general’.

There were few other signs of Dali’s Islamic heritage. Opposite the side entrance to my hotel, along a small alleyway, there were a few halal restaurants with signs written in Arabic script, and in these restaurants there were men in skull-caps, and women in head-scarves, like the other time-travellers, seemingly in a parallel universe to the tourists just beyond their doorstep. The past has been neatly packaged in Dali and the amusement parks and renovated religious sites are key props in the attempt to create a more unified society. The new wave of tourists, perhaps like the settlers of earlier times, are helping refashion the old southwest into an integral part of the new and rising China.

It was hard not to regret the disappearance of the older cultures. But it was also difficult to blame the Chinese. Tourism was lifting up the local economy, creating jobs, and helping reduce poverty. And what was taking root in Yunnan was not anything particularly Chinese, but just an aspect of global consumer culture. Nearly everywhere in Asia this consumerism was on the rise, symbolized best by the colossal shopping malls that had now pushed out from their earliest beachheads in Singapore and Hong Kong to these more remote corners of the continent.

I thought of what was a few hundred miles away on the other side of the border, the impoverished Burma of insurgency, ceasefires, and counter-insurgency. There were the roads being built, the dams, the big mining projects. But I wondered whether it would be Chinese tourism and allied consumerism that in the end would reshape the landscape. Yunnan’s tourists were actually still few, by Chinese standards. But within years they could grow into the tens of millions. How many of these would soon visit Burma as well? In the late nineteenth century, the first railway companies operating to California had been instrumental in promoting West Coast tourism. The China–Burma rail line is primarily meant to facilitate trade in goods. Perhaps mass tourism would follow too.

Analysts of Burma have long wondered how peace might finally come to Burma. Will it be a victory for the Burmese army? Or a victory for its ethnic insurgent foes? But what if neither happens, at least not for decades more, and instead a dozen new shopping malls, tourist attractions, amusement parks, and a flood of Chinese tourist dollars transforms all of northern Burma? Not a formal peace, but a changed way of life. This was something I had not considered before. Perhaps it was a new kind of frontier.

I was now close to Burma, and what remained between Dali and the frontier were a couple of mountain prefectures, home to peoples closely related to those on the other side. Peter Goulart, a Russian who lived in Yunnan in the 1940s, wrote that the area’s ‘secluded ravines and icy mountains’ had for centuries been ‘the cradle and deathbed of nations’. One of these nations was the ancient kingdom of the Naxi, centred on the town of Lijiang, and the inspiration for Shangri-La in James Hilton’s 1933 novel
Lost Horizon
. I went there next.

China is like a series of giant steps, ascending over a thousand miles from its eastern seaboard to the Tibetan uplands, the roof of the world, where elevations average over 12,000 feet. Geologically, Yunnan is part of the Yunnan–Guizhou plateau, the last big step before Tibet, a crush of mountain ranges and deep ravines. The Salween, the Mekong and the Yangtze Rivers all descend in torrents from the snow-peaked mountains in the west of Yunnan, the Salween heading straight south to empty at Moulmein, on the Bay of Bengal, the Mekong snaking its way through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and the Yangtze heading east, through the Chinese heartland, to Shanghai. A fourth great river, the Brahmaputra, starts in an eastward direction from Tibet, before making a U-turn in Yunnan, carving out the Assam valley, and then spilling into the Indian Ocean near Calcutta.

One might imagine that these great river links would have bound Yunnan closely with the wider world. But they have not, as they can only be navigated for short stretches. Narrow gorges and violent cataracts have meant that access to Yunnan has until very recent times been only by foot, or by mule train, and many of its remarkably diverse peoples and cultures, perched up in their own mountain communities and speaking languages known only to them, have had little regular contact with anyone else.

From Dali the old caravan route to Tibet headed north, through the mountain passes, freezing cold in winter. The town of Lijiang was an important stop along the way. I went by bus. The journey once took two or three days, and up until the 1950s caravans had to be guarded against bandit attacks. But now the way from Dali to Lijiang is safe and easy, part of the new and immense system of expressways that are knitting China together from one end to the other. The first Chinese expressway wasn’t build until 1988 and until the middle 1990s only a few had been completed. Today, however, the network of expressways is 40,000 miles long, second only to the United States and catching up fast. The bus I took had comfortable reclining chairs and a movie was shown on a screen up front. The trip was over in less than three hours.

And when we reached the Lijiang plain it seemed like a little world unto itself, surrounded on every side by uninterrupted mountains. There were miles of russet-coloured fields and small sturdy houses, several with satellite dishes and motorcycles or scooters parked out front. Roses, primroses and other flowers grew wild alongside the roadside. We were 7,200 feet above sea level. There was a Himalayan feel to the climate, the air was cold and fresh and the mountains peaks, several miles away, were covered in snow.

Until the communist take-over in the 1940s, the dominant people of the Lijiang valley were the Naxi (sometimes spelled Nakhi), one of the fifty-six ‘nationalities’ officially recognized by the People’s Republic of China. They are a very small nationality, with fewer than 300,000 people, tiny not only compared to the Han Chinese majority (with 1.2 billion plus) but even to other minority peoples in Yunnan. Their language, also called Naxi, is grouped by linguists as part of the Tibeto-Burman language family, and is thought to be closer to Burmese than Tibetan, a hint of an ancient and now entirely forgotten relationship.

The ancestors of today’s Naxi likely arrived in the Lijiang area from somewhere further north, along the craggy edges of Tibet, and until very recent times the Naxi had enjoyed trading links with Lhasa and via Lhasa with India along what was known as the Horse and Tea Road. Farmers in the valley grew rice and vegetables, while people in the highlands grew maize and wheat and tended goats, horses and yak.

They were an entirely independent people until the thirteenth century, when a Mongol army under Kublai Khan cantered into the valley as part of a grand pincer move against China’s Sung dynasty. At that time, the Mongol empire was in the ascendant, lording over a vast region from Korea to the oasis towns of the Silk Road to Persia and the Arab world. At the other end of the steppe, they had just defeated a combined army of the king of Hungary and the Teutonic Knights, crossed the Danube and reached the gates of Vienna. They had also subdued all of northern China, but the Sung still held the south of the country, from the Yangtze River to Vietnam. For forty years the Mongols and the Chinese were at war.

Then the Mongol leader Kublai Khan changed tactics. He reckoned that to conquer the Sung he first had to outflank them and seize the Sichuan basin, to the west of the Chinese heartland. And to outflank Chinese forces in Sichuan, he first had to command the mountain valleys to Sichuan’s southwest. This included the Naxi kingdom. And so, in 1253, a huge Mongol-led force marched south through the icy passes, crossing the Dadu River north of Lijiang, and annexing the little chieftainships they encountered along the way. With each victory, selected Mongol officers were ordered to remain behind, taking local women as wives; up to the twentieth century there would be chiefly families descended from these marriages, the only patrilineal clans in an otherwise matrilineal society.

The Mongols then rode to where Lijiang is today. The ancestors of the Naxi, seeing which way the wind was blowing, offered their help, providing the invaders with goatskin rafts and guiding them to the Old Stone Bridge at Dayan, their principal settlement. The chief of the Mu clan, the Naxi ruler, submitted to Mongol authority and was allowed to keep his position. In thanks, the Mongols left half of the orchestra that was accompanying them, a gift of music to their newest vassals.

From the bus station a taxi had taken me to the edge of the ‘old town’. Taxis and most other vehicles were not allowed in. To one side of me was a four-lane street with lots of traffic and modern shops, most of them selling car parts and construction equipment, and to the other was an unbroken row of small chocolate-coloured wooden buildings, all in a traditional Chinese style, with shutters and decorated roofs. A cobblestone road led though a big ceremonial gateway and then into a maze of more wooden buildings. Every few feet there were lampposts with hanging red lanterns and old gas lamps. It was easy to imagine Mongol horsemen suddenly appearing around the corner, fresh from battle with Teutonic Knights.

Old town Lijiang is a reconstruction. In February 1996 an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale destroyed much of what was there, killing 200 people and injuring 14,000 others, many seriously. Nearly 300,000 people were forced out of their damaged homes. Hundreds of aftershocks followed. Landslides destroyed more homes in the mountains nearby. Lijiang had to be rebuilt and the flimsy concrete towers that had sprung up over the 1980s and early 1990s were replaced with sturdier lower-rise buildings and more traditional single-family dwellings. With help from the World Bank, the old town was restored, with new old-looking streets, bridges and canals. In 1999, Lijiang ‘old town’ was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The boom in domestic tourism soon followed.

My hotel was in a quiet alley, but steps away there were legions of Chinese tourists, strolling up and down the high street. The old town had been rebuilt as a sort of movie set cum amusement park, like Dali, a place for Chinese visitors to walk around, eat, shop, and feel like they were in a strange and distant place. The high street was at least a mile long, lined with dozens of souvenir shops. At one end of the high street was the ‘Old Stone Bridge’, reconstructed, so the tourist pamphlets said, at the very place where the Mongols had tethered their ponies and pitched their tents. Right next to it was an enormous wooden watermill. There were other, smaller watermills elsewhere, as well as many canals, some substantial, with a footbridge to cross, others no bigger than a drain. The water was sparkling clean. Actually everything was spotless, including the several public toilets, and even the wood on the buildings looked like it had been recently varnished. In keeping with the exotic look, the salespeople, nearly all women, wore the Naxi costume, a sort of bright blue smock with black cloth shoes and a cap, like a coif in a Flemish painting. There were shops selling locally made paper, silver, leather goods, and the tea, yogurts and cheeses that were the specialities of Lijiang.

For the first couple of days in Lijiang, my walks were essentially confined to the ‘old town’. The high street led to a central plaza, from which there were a couple of other big streets and lots of little alleyways. The tourists, almost all Asian from their appearance and (I would guess) overwhelmingly Chinese, stuck close to the main avenues. The side streets just a few feet away were practically empty.

The Naxi kingdom had been ruled by the same Mu clan since medieval times. The time of the Manchu or Qing dynasty in China–the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries–was the heyday of the regional tea trade and a time when the Naxi kingdom and its Mu rulers had prospered. They were a leading force along the Tibet and Yunnan borderlands and acted as a bridge between the Tibetan and Chinese worlds. The royal family were well versed in Chinese culture and the Confucian classics and wrote Chinese poetry and essays, and a family library housed their accumulated works. They were not Chinese or controlled by China, but their elites were drawn tightly into Beijing’s cultural orbit.

The palace was now a museum. It too had been heavily damaged during the earthquake and had since been remade. It looked like a small version of the Forbidden City in Beijing: the court yard, the wide whitewashed steps, the open throne room and multi-tiered roof looked the same. The main difference seemed to be the tiger skin that draped the throne, an odd touch on an otherwise Chinese scene. The tourist brochures referred to the palace as the ‘Mu House’ as, I suppose, a palace would under line the kingdom’s once independent status. The Mu, from the Chinese perspective, were a local ruling clan, natives granted permission to govern by the distant imperial court.

The Naxi have a wonderful and unique writing system, centuries old. For the most part, they use simple pictograms, cartoonish, almost child like in their representations of words. A cartoon-like picture of a friendly-looking tiger means ‘tiger’, for example, whilst a more abstract concept, like ‘marriage’ is shown by two stick-figures, one lying on top of another, inside a house. All along the high street were little shops selling images of the Naxi script–on scrolls, on prints for framing, on postcards and on T-shirts.

None of the salespeople, though, seemed particularly interested in tempting customers, and sat in their shops watching television or nibbling on a snack. I spoke to a few of them in my very basic Chinese and learned that none were actually Naxi. They were Chinese or Bai, from Dali or elsewhere in Yunnan. They were in Lijiang for work, to make money and said they wore Naxi costumes to please the tourists.

The only ‘real’ Naxi I saw that first day were in the central square. They were four old men, all with wispy grey hair, two in tortoiseshell glasses, sitting on benches that circled a tree, enjoying the afternoon sun, chatting, dressed in Mao suits and navy greatcoats, their canes resting by their sides. Occasionally, another old man would walk past and there were hearty greetings. They would have been teenagers or young men around the time of the communist revolution, and would have remembered the old Lijiang, and this central square at a time when there were no Chinese and no tourists, only the occasional Tibetan horse-trader or tea-merchant, fresh from braving the bandit-infested mountain passes and looking for an inn for the night.

Now the square was packed but the old men seemed unaffected by all the people swirling around. I crept over and sat down on one of the benches. One of the old men in halting Mandarin asked me where I was from. I said ‘Mien Dien’, meaning ‘Burma’ in Chinese. He smiled, and repeated ‘Mien Dien’, but Burma didn’t seem to mean anything special to him. The Naxi and the Burmese doubtless shared a common ancestry, some of the ancestors of the Burmese having come from the same Tibetan march lands as the people of Lijiang. From Lijiang the Burmese border was only a hundred miles away, but the intervening mountains were as great a barrier as the Sahara was in separating Tunis from Timbuktu. Even in legend the old connections were not remembered.

Just then a group of women of mixed ages, all in Naxi clothes, gathered in the middle of the square. A boom box was placed on the ground and soon the women were dancing (really just swaying back and forth) to what I assumed were Naxi folk tunes. The Chinese tourists were thrilled. Hundreds of cameras snapped away.

On the other side of the square, there were other treats in store. A tall, very dark-skinned, decidedly non-Chinese-looking man in a Tibetan-style fur hat and knee-high felt boots posed next to his horse. Next to him was another man, with a hawk. For a fee, tourists were allowed to mount the horse or hold the hawk and have their picture taken. ‘We wanted to have a special place for our honeymoon and we chose Lijiang,’ said a Chinese visitor. ‘It’s like paradise here, so different from home, and the people on horses are amazing.’

There was a wide choice of restaurants catering to tourists. A couple of times I went to the Blue Papaya Café, not far from the central square. The menu listed dishes by their health function and included special local dishes. Some were purported to ‘invigorate the circulation of blood, bright eyes, relieves pain and internal heat’. There was a ‘Lijiang Ham and Chicken with Gastrodia Elata Hot Pot’. Hot pots seemed to be a local standard and the menu explained that ‘Gastrodia elata grows in deep mountains by valleys and is an Orchidaceae perennial that grows off of mulberry trees.’ There was a whole page devoted to ‘Insects and Worm Dishes’ including ‘Bee Pupa and Fried Dragonfly’. ‘Yak Meat with Lemon on Budock Fungis (a sort of aquatic mushroom)’ was also available. For the less adventurous, ‘Vegetarian Pizza’ was also on offer.

Later, passing through a narrow alley, I saw a stunning young woman in a short lemon-coloured dress modelling for a photographer against a stone wall. Lijiang, I was told, was often used for fashion shoots and even by filmmakers wanting a background different from the modern office blocks elsewhere or needing to recreate historical scenes. A once non-Chinese city had come to represent all of China’s past.